In a 9,000 sq. ft. warehouse on Murray Street in Port Moody, paper, pens, glue, rulers, erasers and about 8,000 other educational supplies fill the tall shelves in narrow aisles.
The store — “a candy shop for teachers,” says co-owner Jan Bell — sells the items year-round to numerous owners and operators of daycares and preschools, schools, city parks and recreation programmers, and other child educational providers across Canada.
Jan Bell, who’s the purchaser, and her husband, Lexus Bell, the president, started Creative Children 21 years ago while living in New Westminster. At the time, she was a bookkeeper and he was an engineer, also building furniture for daycares and preschools.
Both decided they needed a change of pace and chose Port Moody to launch their company, providing unlicensed educational supplies that meet global safety standards.
Five years in, with business booming, they formed a division called Creative Packs, also based out of their Murray Street headquarters. In that division, elementary and middle schools order their supplies in bulk while Creative Packs builds each student’s order and ships the pre-packaged boxes before the school year begins in September.
The Bells won’t say how many boxes will be distributed this week or to what locations but the couple will say the process of building the boxes takes 27 full-time staff all summer.
“We just go, go, go,” Jan Bell said. “It’s labour-intensive but very satisfying as well. We make it easy for parents. Who likes to shop for school supplies at the last minute?”
The pack orders have to be precise: School lists are compiled between November and May based on teachers’ requests and individually inputted into a computer database (Jan Bell said their system became “way easier” when it went online a few years back).
Then, between June and the third week of September, staff are put into teams, with a leader assigned to a school and grade, to load the boxes on a kind of assembly line.
Once their boxes are complete, they’re put onto skids and wrapped to prevent breakage; they are then moved into other warehouses for shipping, which is outsourced.
She said a few calls do come in about missing products in late September, which means she then has to go back to the individual order sheets to see if that item was in fact purchased, and courier it to the school with the child’s name on the envelope.
There’s little room for error. “We’re all about customer service,” she said. “We have a daycare that moved to the east coast and they still order from us. Our clients are loyal.”
There is also little room for down time, with two businesses on the go all year round.
Creative Children is the bigger of the two, Lexus Bell said, with parents and childcare providers shopping all year for educational needs. Between December and March, Jan Bell places her product orders with Canadian vendors or companies with Canadian operations “and every year, I look at last year’s orders and I buy 20% more for this year,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s how much our two businesses are growing.”
Creative Children also has a charitable component: The Bells have donated Creative Packs to a Facebook group for moms, and to PACs and local schools that have identified struggling families. “It’s our way to give back to the community,” Lexus Bell said.
